The Elusive Language of Ducks (35 page)

I'll split, he said.

No, don't. Please. I'll come down to Te Awamutu with you, if you still want to. It would be good to have company. You're right. It has to be done.

Whatever.

But not today.

No.

Tomorrow?

Fine.

I don't know what happened just then, she said.

His elbows on the table now as he massaged his head, mumbling at the table. Look, sorry, Hannah. Apologies. Up early, well, up most of the night. A lot of pacing around before I got on the plane this morning. Forgive me. I shouldn't have spoken like that. Not a good idea to fight with a drunk on a cliff-top.

His long fingers digging into his head, circling through his wavy hair. She said nothing. Watching him as random thoughts flashed through her
head. How many people were still straining to pull themselves from the debris-strewn water? How many people who, just a day before, had been idly contemplating the trivia of their lives only to find themselves, right now, releasing their last breath? How controlled and peaceful and ordinary her mother's death was in comparison, lying flat in a comfortable bed as she and Simon waited together. And how many people in all the world were entwined together, at this very moment. She thought of the duck obediently sleeping on her lap all night. The whole night fighting the urge to slide her hand to rest quietly under the comfort of his wing. That was all she would have needed to complete such a strange and wondrous sense of unity with him.

Finally Toby lifted his head. Pulled his eyes open by raising his eyebrows, and gave her a forced clowny grin, his grey lips closed.

All my oomph has gone. Out the window. What were we saying?

You were making me choose between the duck and my husband. Don't misinterpret the hesitation. I miss Simon and I love him.

At that she pulled her hand up to her mouth and bit the side of her finger. Her teeth dug so deeply into the flesh, harder and harder but still she couldn't feel any pain. At least it stopped her crying.

She pushed the salmon towards him.

Eat.

He groaned. Actually, Hannah, I need to lie down. Haven't had much sleep. He took another gulp of the Cointreau and shuddered. Shit. He plunged his head into his arm and shuddered again.

OK. I'll get your bed ready.

She went to the warming cupboard and took clean sheets and pillow cases to the spare room, her mother's room, the room where she'd been sleeping the past two or three months. She could hear Toby in the bathroom, and then he was behind her, holding his bag. As she started to pull back the sheets, he stopped her.

Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. No fuss. Don't change the sheets, he mumbled. Any old gutter will do. Gravity is overwhelming me.

She looked up at him. His face looked chiselled, every bone jutting into his waxy skin. The tide was sucking out from his flesh. She stepped back to let him pass. He staggered, then dropped onto the bed and tried to shove one shoe off with the other. Exasperated because it wouldn't budge.

Here, let me do it.

She knelt on the floor and untied the laces. The shoe was long and polished. Brown with rows of indentations patterned around the toe and the edge. She tugged it away. His sock clung damply to his foot which dangled from his white leg. Then the other. This time she eased the shoe away more effectively, down from the heel and sliding it along the sole. She placed the shoes alongside each other and stood up.

There you go, she said. He continued to sit, staring ahead.

Hannah, he whispered. Look. He lifted a finger and pointed at the oval mirror hanging from the wall. She stood alongside him. He wouldn't have been happy with his reflection. He could have been an old man, shrunken, stooped, his stormy hair above hollow eyes. His bottom teeth cluttered behind his drooping mouth. And she, looking hideous with her blown-up bruised eye.

Ssssh, she said. You're burnt out, that's all. She stood between him and the mirror. Come on, lie down. He shook his head briskly and rubbed his scalp.

Come on, Toby, she coaxed.

Is she always there?

Who?

Your mother. Pointing at me.

Don't be silly, she said. It was you. You were pointing at yourself.

It was your mother. Her lips were moving but I couldn't hear. I couldn't hear her. She had something to say.

Hannah tugged the bedding from under his bottom. She hugged him. Ripples of fear shivered through his coat. He allowed her to lower his trembling bones and shrinking flesh onto the mattress, shaking the pillow before releasing his head into it. The skirt of her nightdress poked from beneath. Tiny cogs beating beneath his jaw, like the busy mandibles of a sea creature lodged under his skin. She hoisted his feet up and under the sheet. Pulled the duvet over his shoulders.

I'm cold, he whispered. Freezing. My blood is crystallising. His fingers clawing the duvet around his ears, under his chin.

She plugged in the electric blanket and switched it on.

Water, he murmured.

But when she returned with a jug of water he was asleep. She filled the
glass on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed, staring into the mirror. Sheila was right, she
had
lost weight. She waited, closed her eyes and listened to Toby's noisy breathing, whispered and conspiratorial, like tiny faraway voices of censure. Outside in the magnolia tree, the frenetic clicking and lazy plunging whistle of a starling. A plane, filled with hundreds of people, whirring precariously across the sky. A car driving past. Another car. The world continuing about its business.

She opened her eyes again. Still there was just her own reflection framed, her eye buried in a swollen mocking wink. She stared into the mirror, at the mound of Toby under the bedclothes, at the wall behind her, at the small floral armchair sitting empty in the corner of the room. She searched for moving shadows, for shifting light. If only she could find a clue that her mother was more than just an urn — or half an urn — of ashes, buried under the bedclothes in a far corner across from Toby's sleeping body.

She bent over and kissed his impassive cheek. Lifted her hand and let it rest lightly on his cool forehead. Her blue nightdress poked from beneath the pillow. If she hadn't been afraid of disturbing him, she would have tugged it out with the other personal detritus that had gathered under and around her pillow: face cream, hair ties, a few screwed-up balls of tissue. She turned the blanket down to its lowest setting and left the room.

Down in the garden, the duck was sitting peacefully on one of his pillows where she had left it beside the day lilies around the pond. He jumped up when he saw her, rushed to nibble her feet and then back to Annabel for some unabashed sex.

She sat eating another piece of toast and salmon, shifting her bottom uncomfortably over the cold damp ground. Each blade of the grass around her looked recently polished. The duck jumped from the pillow and waddled to the pond where he started his post-coital ablutions, water spraying everywhere, leaving a shattered necklace of pearly drops on the agave leaves.

Ducko?

She tossed him a crust. He ignored her.

About last night.

He dug busily into his self, his beak clamping on and swishing each feather from bottom to top, every single feather receiving his attention in an efficient matter-of-fact sort of way. He was a parent slicking the hair of all his uncomplaining children.

The mash. I've thought about it and we're not going to do that now. It's not fair on either you or my mother.

Now the uropygial gland again, now the wings. There was nothing he didn't know. All the clues imparted to him by the sensible overnight educator. If only she had such a mentor.

We're going to take you to Te Awamutu. There will be attractive white muscovy ducks there, truly gorgeous ducks there, and I'm talking about actual ducks, not drakes. And there's a pond there, a much bigger pond than here, a pond with dragonflies and frogs and bulrushes, and a sweeping lawn where you can lie with your friends in the sun, and many trees with fat curling branches where you can perch if you so desire. And natural hideouts amongst the bushes where you can shelter. There will be lots of you, and you can sleep with your furry eyelids closed because you won't have to be the only one constantly on the look-out for predators. At night you can all traipse into an enclosure protected with a high wire fence. And there'll be puddles teeming with worms, and also cicadas and
crickets and cockroaches everywhere in abundance.

He stretched and spread his wings.

You might need to talk to your overnight educator about how to behave with your special white duck. Or ducks, as the case may be. Lovely moving Annabels with wings and legs. And other curly inside bits . . . that pillows don't have.

And now his head rubbing nonchalantly on his back, his crest high.

I must say, Ducko, you are looking extraordinarily handsome yourself. Your plumage is at its best. Every feather in its place, as smooth as the egg you came from. Lovely patterned pebbly grey on white. And your juicy crimson beak knobble, just ripe for the picking. You'd be the beau of any ball. The grand drake of the paddock. If I were a duck myself . . .

He cocked his head suddenly, his eye bright.

I'm going to miss you, Duckie.

He lifted his claws and furiously scratched the back of his head, then edged around the pond, away from her, cutting through the day lilies and across the lawn, where he started munching on dandelion leaves.

Well, anyway, she called. Tomorrow, OK? Don't say I didn't tell you.

And when night fell, after the duck was in bed in his hotel, she curled up into the armchair in the room with Toby, still clothed, because the dark held so many uncertainties. Because if the Earth burst into smithereens she did not want to be alone. Because, if the Earth stayed intact, she was frightened that Toby might be dying and she felt that, if she were there, she'd be able to prevent such a thing happening, in the way that a woman could stand at the edge of a dense forest, calling her loved ones back home.

In the small still hours of the night she woke up from her dozing to hear him groan, then shift heavily around in the bed, patting the sheets. Then the darker shape of his body rose from the gloom.

Maggs? he mumbled.

Toby, Toby. Her dislocated whispering filled the room. Maggie's not here.

What the hell! Who are you? What's going on?

Ssssh, Toby, it's me, Hannah. Sorry, sorry.

Hannah, what the fuck? What am I . . .?

She jumped from the chair and turned on the light, to see him withering from the glare, his arm shielding his eyes.

Turn it off, turn it off.

So she did. Stood hesitantly by the door.

What's going on, Hannah? What are you doing here?

I'm sorry. I was . . . concerned about you. I'll go now.

Go? Where will you go?

To my own bed.

Where's Maggie?

In Christchurch.

Oh yeah. Of course, of course. Yeah yeah yeah. God. OK. Heck. I'd kill for a glass of water.

She moved to the drawers by his bed, feeling for the glass she'd left there earlier. Their spider fingers touched in the dark as she placed the glass in his hand.

He drank, burped loudly, and bumped the glass onto the bedside table.

Ta. Yern angel.

Then he flopped down again under the covers. Shortly afterwards she could hear that he was asleep. She refilled the glass from the jug, then dragged herself up the stairs to the pristine white bedroom that she had prepared for Simon's homecoming.

Chapter 27

It was another two days before they managed to set off with the blindfolded duck enclosed in the cardboard box on the back seat of her car. Hannah sat with her hand resting in the box, like a child feeling for a lucky dip.

The sock over the duck's eyes had sent him into a sleepy, albeit reluctant trance. Her palm cupped under his beak seemed to soothe him. If she took her hand away he'd panic, scrabbling noisily round the box that was just big enough to contain him. It was reassuring that he trusted her enough to feel pacified by her. Nonetheless, or even because of this, she felt treacherous. This time, the operation to coerce — no . . . capture and force him into the box — was planned and neatly managed, with Toby clasping the duck's wriggling body at arm's length as she manoeuvred the sock over the head. Toby then helped by holding the box and closing the lid. She could hear workmen across the valley dismantling a house, hammering and smashing, crashing building materials into a bin. The afternoon echoed with the sound. She imagined birds in the trees nearby, and on the roof, cocking their heads accusingly. She was the cat that had finally, inevitably, pounced.